I'm
the parent. You're not the boss of me.
by Bethany Mandel in PJ Media
Recently the New York Times
ran a blog post titled “Skipping School for Vacation: Good for
Families, or Bad for Students?” Whatever the opposite of burying the
lede is, the Times did it. In the first two paragraphs they recount one
mother’s recent run-in with her local educational authorities:
In the article “Taking My Kid Out of School for a Family Vacation Shouldn’t
Be ‘Illegal,’” Jeanne Sager recounts the time she took her daughter
out of school for a family vacation, and the school responded by labeling those
absences “illegal.” Ms. Sager wrote, “I hate my kid’s school and the state
education department for making me feel ashamed of spending time with my
daughter,” adding, “I think there’s something to be said for education outside
of the classroom, and certainly something to be said for the value of family
time.”
While the label “illegal” does not
confer any actual legal implications in Jeanne Sager’s case, plenty of school
districts do employ the term in its literal sense. Some states give schools the authority to impose fines
for truancy, and others allow parents to be charged with
misdemeanors if truancy becomes chronic. In Britain and the Netherlands, truant officers are
posted at airports and train stations to ensure parents don’t attempt to take
children on vacation during the school term.
The Times goes on to explain
the pros and cons of taking kids out of school for family vacations, based on
the perspectives of teachers and parents, completely ignoring the troublesome
practice of declaring vacations “illegal.” It is the latest, perhaps inevitable
development in the ever-expanding limits on how parents are “allowed” to
parent.
Of all of the words in the English
language that grate on me most as a parent, it’s the word “allowed.” I first
heard it with regard to childbirth. I was told by my OB that I was not
“allowed” to eat in labor, without anything resembling a convincing reason. In
the book Expecting Better, economist Emily Oster breaks down pregnancy
myths and prevailing wisdom, tackling the issue of eating during labor:
The basic fear is gastric aspiration,
and it’s related to why you shouldn’t eat, in general, before any operation. If
you are under general anesthesia and you vomit, it is possible to inhale your
stomach contents into the lungs and suffocate. Pregnant women may be at more
risk than the general population for this. In general, this definitely is
dangerous, but you might be wondering why this is an issue in labor. Even if
you have a C-section, aren’t you usually awake? So wouldn’t you know if you
were vomiting? Is this still an issue?
To figure out the origin of this
restriction, we actually have to go back to a time (the first half of the
twentieth century) when C-sections were typically performed under a general
anesthetic. The source of the ban on food during labor is a 1946 paper in the American
Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The authors reported that of 44,016
pregnancies at the Lying-In Hospital in New York from 1932 to 1945, there were
66 incidents of gastric aspiration and 2 deaths from suffocation. The authors
suggested withholding food during labor.2 Fast-forward 64 years: a lot has
changed about labor and medical practice in general. C-sections are now
performed with local anesthesia 90 percent of the time, so you are typically
not asleep. Moreover, even if you are under general anesthesia, our
understanding of how that works has improved a lot. The estimated risk of
maternal death from aspiration is 2 in 10 million births, or 0.0002 percent.3
Yes, maternal mortality is terrifying. But to put this in perspective: this
cause accounts for only 0.2 percent of maternal deaths in the United States,
mostly among very high-risk women. The perhaps scary truth is that you’re more
likely to die in a car accident on the way to the hospital than from this
cause. In a review article from 2009, researchers looked at almost 12,000 women
who ate and drank what they wanted during labor. Even though some of these
women did need emergency C-sections (one of the few times when you might be
under a general anesthesia), there were no problems reported associated with
aspiration. This is true even for the 22 percent of women who ate solid food.4
And yet the ban on food remains.
I took my business elsewhere three
weeks before my due date, switching my care provider to a midwife who didn’t
“allow” or “disallow” anything; she left me to deliver my child in the way in
which I saw fit, as long as it was medically safe.
We’ve been hearing the word
“allowed” with regard to parenting decisions a lot recently. Parents in
Maryland were investigated by Child Protective Services for letting their
children walk home from a nearby park; apparently they were not “allowed” to do
so. Another parent recently confessed to the blog Free Range Kids that she too
had faced the wrath of CPS in Maryland, and now has a misdemeanor on her
record, in addition to six months’ probation. Her crime? She left her ten year
old and baby in her car for a ten-minute run into the grocery store, another
parenting decision a mother apparently wasn’t “allowed” to make. These kinds of
stories are becoming increasingly common.
Parents, schools, and caregivers are
taking these stories to heart, deciding against giving children a measure of
independence out of fear. According to Free Range Kids, there’s little reason
to fear. Crime of all sorts is lower now than it was in
previous generations.
When the parents in Maryland found
themselves the target of a CPS investigation, many of my fellow parents
commented on Facebook that they had contacted their local police department to
find out at what age they allow (there’s that word again) parents to leave
their children home alone and at what age the state allows children to walk
alone.
Schools tell parents they are not
“allowed” to have their children leave school without an adult escort, leaving
families to hire babysitters or curtail their workdays to walk their kids a few
blocks home from school.
Contra the officers of the state,
there should be only one party in a position to “allow” children to be home
alone or to walk alone for time periods and distances that have always, until
now, been considered reasonable: the parents. Society might be trying to take
away parents’ ability to parent, but that doesn’t mean that parents should
surrender their rights willingly.
Just as I did not need to be “allowed”
by my OB to labor in my own safe manner (proven to be safe by statistics), I do
not intend to let the public school system determine if it’s “legal” to take
family vacations or when a child is permitted to walk alone in their
neighborhood. Nor should the police be involved in cases of reasonable parental
discretion.
If a school does not “allow” my
family to make basic child-rearing decisions, there are alternatives. As for
the legal crackdown on parenting decisions, I will not allow them to shape how I
parent. I refuse to raise my children in an illogical and unnecessary cloud of
fear. And I should not even have to dignify with a response the suggestion that
my family vacation is “illegal.”
Bethany Mandel is a graduate
of Rutgers University with a BA in History and Jewish Studies. Previously she
worked as a teacher in rural Cambodia, as an online fundraiser at The Heritage
Foundation and most recently the Social Media Associate at Commentary Magazine.
She is currently a work-at-home mother. She has appeared on CNBC's The Kudlow
Report, Huffington Post Live, BBC World's World Have Your Say, and is a regular
guest on "Powers to the People" on Talk Radio 1380am WNRR. She was
chosen by The Jewish Week as one of its "36 Under 36" in 2013, an
annual list of individuals reinventing Jewish life. She lives with her husband
Seth Mandel, an assistant editor for Commentary Magazine, in New Jersey.
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